A new criticism of evolution

Well here’s one I hadn’t heard before—if it’s not a joke. And believe me, the criticisms of evolution are often so ludicrous that they seem to be jokes (the classic is “if we evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?).

If you know the mindset of grassroots creationists (whether YEC or ID) their lack of a functioning Map of Time in their heads can easily lead to the sort of thinking Sooner displayed. If monkeys evolved (in a snap) from fish, shouldn’t they still have gills to breath underwater? Such a confusion is easy to make if there is no line of tetrapods and therapsids betwixt the fish ancestors and the primates knocking about 300+ million years later.

I tried probing Sooner for his sources (so far unsuccessfully) (I’m @RJDownard on Twitter) Sooner did post a typical creationist trope pic (asking where are the “millions” of human evo fossils when there are “millions” of chimps). That pic, which does derive from fringe YEC lore, does help identify Sooner’s copying venue, but from a methods approach it would be nice to pin down what (if any) antievo works he’d relied on.

Sooner’s varied views are indeed not at all unusual. With very few exceptions, antievolutionists are Kulturkampf conservative religious believers, meaning religious faith is only a subset of a broader cultural frame that tropes many odd beliefs because they are simply applying the same bad credulity that they use both for their faith and their science convictions.

Sooner is both a nickname for people from Oklahoma and the mascot for the University of Oklahoma’s sports teams. So, the name Sooner4life implies that @Rickeylarry is either a resident of the State of Oklahoma, or at least has some connection to the University of Oklahoma although not likely anything beyond being a fan of their football team.
The reason that this is relevant is that Oklahoma is a part of America where everything you described above can be found in abundance, lending further credibility to the notion that this person isn’t joking, is likely a devout Christian and is almost certainly the product of a culture in which public education is not taken seriously, if not outright vilified.

The question as to why there are no amphibious monkeys reminded me of a post from a creationist (the last two sentences in the first paragraph are the relevant ones):

“I think the data demonstrates that the level of interbreeding is on a much lower level than inter-Phylum, but to be honest, I didn’t want to say that before in such a direct way, because I figured that you would dismiss me outright. I am much more inclined toward the idea that the pre and post-zygotic limits are more restrictive than I have discussed previously, as you pointed out, Bears and Dogs in the same phylum cannot interbreed, and it is a good example. I actually think the evidence suggest that the “common ancestry” within phyla are much more limited as well. Dogs/Wolves have pretty much always been Dog/Wolflike, with minor variations. We don’t see wolves with gills or flippers, or wolves with leaves and roots.

Why not?

Which way does the “tree of life” grow? Can animals “evolve” into plants? If not, why not?”

The creationist’s attitude there is again fully consistent with how they view the world: familiar kinds (that in practice are comparable to families, except for humans when they drop to species), uncluttered by a familiarity with the kind-busting fossil record.

Plants being on multi-endosymbiotic systems (possessing cyanobacterial-derived chloroplasts along with mitochondria) there are too many contingent derived elements to the plant line to think any metazoan vertebrate could develop in any way that would be deeply plant-like. It’s a lot easier to keep the players straight when a lot of them are in one’s Map of Time, but antievolutionists don’t configure one of those in their own head, so end up offering views like the one quoted.

The baraminology gang are a fascinating bunch, and their output a gold mine to reveal the underlying methodology of the higher level creationist, the ones striving for scientific accuracy. Kurt Wise (who has a paleontology decree, studying for a time under Steve Gould at Harvard btw) has been the major nomenclature guide for the technique, which is to identify “holobaramins” (the preserved or living members of created kinds), including “monobaramins” (naturally evolved subsets of a holobaramin, one example being of all things the horse evolution sequence!).

They are honestly dedicated to pinning down the created kinds, but in practice reveal only their ability to parse datasets to keep the baramins from being too troubling. Which is hard to do, as one recent study plopped some of the australopithecines and all of Homo genus (including H. habilis and erectus) in the human holobaramin (something that would have been heresy back in Gish era of creationism). Fortunately most grassroots creationists (including Ken Ham) don’t appear to actually read any of the baraminology work, so its a lot of rarified wheelspinning few on YEC notice or cite.

I’ve been following and dissecting the baraminology literature for some time, latest being a 2014 stab by one fellow, an M. Aaron, to parse one minor family in the reptile-mammal transition, which I tumbled onto in the course of writing a new book on the RMT (now done) and how antievolutionists avoid it. Aaron left out big chunks of the taxa and their character states (cribbed from several technical papers, as baraminologists don’t assemble their own cladistic datasets, but filch from the works of others). Weird creationist John Woodmorappe did likewise with a trio of technical papers on the RMT, which I also explored at length in the new book (Phillip Johnson and David Berlinski both clumsily lauded Woodmorappe’s piece, which warrants a dentary jaw drop just for that).

Ahhh, Woodmorappe and Wise – two blasts unfortunately not from the past. Yes, baraminology has always had even more of an air of despair about it than the average bit of creationism, but it uses too many polysyllables for most creationists to get their lips around.
“RMT” ??

RMT = Reptile-Mammal Transition (sorry, got into the habit of acronyming it in new book, to avoid spelling it out repeatedly). The baraminology polysyllables are Kurt Wise’s doing. Since he is familiar with standard taxonomy and cladistics, he retermed things to fit the new paradign. So “holotype” (the initial exemplar of a taxon) became “holobaramin” (the physically preserved samples of a baramin). “Monobaramin” is the one I love, though, since that’s an evolutionary subset of a baramin, and every one they find only reinforces the evolutionary chain they do not want to be true (for example, Jean Lightner’s functional acceptance of 1200 species of finch as within a finch bird kind, meaning the Galapagos paternity suit with the mainland grassquits accepted by proxy). Lightner studiously avoided including any fossil data in her parsing, though.

okeey dookey. The amazon paperback and Kindle version just went up yesterday (separate ISBN number for that version compared to the specifically ebook format that went up first at lulu and Nook for their formats), so “Evolution Slam Dunk: Why the Reptile-Mammal Transition Proves Macroevolution and How Antievolutionists Ignore It” is now available for all ebooks and in print. It’s been a busy 9 months for me writing it.

(Never brought anything for my Kindle – still got thousands of unread books on it, and I get through them at one or two a year.)
I think the necessary details for the Kindle version are “ASIN: B01N6FV206”
For the ink-on-paper version … I can’t find a link for that, either on Amazon-Tax-Dodgers-Inc or LULU. Oh, try Amazon’s American site … there it is “ISBN-10: 1540736296 ISBN-13: 978-1540736291” Got it, and picking up a few other things from the reprehensible ones while I’m there.

If -big if- he really wants to know or at least get an idea, he might read something that goes into the history of life, e.g. ‘The Ancestors Tale’ by Dawkins.
[Note, Gish’s sarcastic and ludicrous “cow-mermaid” is approximated by the sirenians 😊]

I helped a friend replace a patio door a few months ago. When we removed the old doors, we left them propped up against the side wall of his house. It rained heavily for the next two days. When we went to dispose of the old doors, we noticed what looked like the carcasses of brine shrimp, or something very similar, in the interior the old doors. He lives very near the ocean and the best explanation we could come up with is that gulls often perch on his roof and the shrimp must have come from their droppings which was then washed off the roof during the rain storm, eventually settling inside the doors. I don’t know if that even makes any sense, but it’s the least crazy explanation we could come up with.

I believe that I have an answer for Mr. TakethatDarwin. As I understand it, the genes for making gills are present in humans and other land animals but are broken. In fact, at least in science fiction, it has been claimed that they could be repaired and an animal who could live on land and in water could be created.

That monkey stuff is from Sooner4life’s Twitter feed [address @RickeyLarry], @TakeThatDarwin is an ‘evolutionist’ who enjoys re-tweeting the creationist drivel.

An example of what you’re talking about is the function of the Sonic Hedgehog gene [I’m not making that up] in human limb development – it dictates the identity of each finger in humans & some other things, but it’s associated with the development of the branchial rays in skate embryos. Branchial rays are part of the gill complex for skates. It goes all the way back to the jawed vertebrates…

Not exactly. That’s what you might expect a designer to do. If the best eye turns out to be one you put in an octopus, then you can retrofit it into an ape whose lineage split with the octopus before that eye had been optimised.

Evolution can only work with what it has at the present time in a given population. Tweak this here and twist that there to do something new and useful. Gill arches got reworked into many interesting things. What didn’t happen is whales and turtles reacquiring the gills their ancestors once had.

Indeed, a specific example of fly-by-seat-of-pants contingency is the shape of the 1959 Cadillac back end. The 1958 recession slumped sales on all makes, who were scrambling to jumbo-size their fleets to compete with the larger Forward Look Chrysler products. The need to quickly redesign the 1959 model year at GM forced some ad hoc cost cutting. Buick’s swept back model was already in the works, and the top brass decreed Cadillac had to use the doors already engineered for the Buick. They had to incorporate that dropping curve into their designs, resulting in a very low taillight ring topped by about the same height of fin as the 1958 model, but which looked way taller because it sprouted from a lower back line.

This fall I made a career change. I returned to teaching, this time as a middle school science teacher. It’s a great job that I truly love doing, but one of the few frustrating things about this job is that crafty 6th & 8th grade (11-14 yo) students think they can just deny that evolution is real, invoke their religious beliefs and be excused from learning the material. This may be cynical, but I’m inclined to believe that they’re more interested in avoiding their studies than they are interested in defending their religious convictions. It’s a moot point anyway as the end result is a child whom does not receive proper instruction regarding evolution, which is particularly problematic (sorry!) for my 8th graders as in two years they will be studying biology in high school. How can a student pass biology without understanding the fundamental concept upon which biology is built?
I’m also troubled by the fact that when I instruct my students to do research on evolution, they often bring me things from Answers in Genesis, which is, unfortunately, most often the first hit from a google search related to evolution.

Maybe this is a teachable moment of another kind: information/source literacy. I wonder how kids these days would react to a “no Internet sources” ban. Of course that would wall off Panda’s Thumb and the Talk Origins archive, etc. too …

I thought about that, but the principal nixed the idea as our school charter focuses on “information technology based learning” so I require the kids to use at least three different sources.
In a related story, charter schools are an educational disaster.

I agree that charter schools are an educational disaster. They rarely perform any better than the local public schools and siphon off money and hurt public schools while being able to exempt rules and regulations. I also find them elitist, even if they choose by lottery. All students should be able to equally benefit from any program, not a selected few.

AiG & ICR have dumped on wackaloon Kent Hovind for years as an unreliable disgrace to Christian creationism, but that hasn’t slowed Hovind’s popularity in the slightest, so don’t hold your breath that even invoking in-house sources like that would do any better when dealing with parents, teachers or students who do not think about things they do not think about.

I have a certain degree of sympathy for AiG as a quixotic lost cause. They believe in the literal accuracy of the Bible, but they also believe that scientific inquiry will therefore inevitably confirm the ‘truth’. (I think they’re doomed to disappointment, but at least they are trying). Notably, they do not approve of ‘lying for Jesus’, which is to their credit.

Absolutely, but in fact most antievolutionists do not believe in “lying for Jesus.” The vast majority at all levels (ID, OEC or YEC) firmly believe everything they believe to be actually true.

The way they can accomplish that (from a Ken Ham to a Michael Denton over in ID Land) is that (1) they rely heavily on secondary sources they do not fact check (daisy-chain authority quoting is a pathology among antievolutionists), (2) their core fact claimants (a tiny group of only 3 dozen people currently, 2/3 of them YECers) bump into at best 10 percent of the relevant dataset, which (3) none of them ever bother to relate to a “Map of Time” conception (this happened, then this happened, then this happened), abetted by (4) a genuine inability to conceptualize what evidence they’d ever accept to change their minds (there are no counterexamples in thousands of antievolution works I am aware of, covering decades, where an antievolutionist explains what a transitional form would need to look like, in detail, such that they would accept it as evidence for evolution).

Those 4 properties pretty much insulate committed antievolutionists from cognitive dissonance, such that actively lying need never be in their behavioral repertoire.

Congratulations for the new job!
I have had a few students denying evolution (1st year medical students, not middle school kids!), and I have told them that they must read and when asked, tell what we are teaching them about evolution, and after explaining the theory they are free to add that they disagree with it because of their religious convictions.